Chief Frost lays out priorities: tech, community outreach

Riverhead’s new chief of police, Chief Ed Frost, is focused on securing cutting-edge technology and equipment for the department and strengthening the bonds between town police and the community, he said Saturday at the first of three scheduled “Meet the Chief” forums.

“I’m looking at camera systems that integrate everything and make everything easy to search,” Chief Ed Frost said at the Riverhead Senior Center in Aquebogue.

The new chief, who was sworn in last month, is also outfitting department members with body cameras, paid for with state grant money that came through earlier this year, and putting license plate readers on all patrol cars.

“In today’s world, everything is computer-based, phone-based, and you have to have that knowledge of how all that stuff comes together,” he said, adding that, these days, “everything’s trackable in one way or another.”

The new chief is also upgrading the department’s translation software, which allows police to reach a translator in real time to help them communicate in any language.

“We’re going with a different company that’s much better” than the one Riverhead cops are currently using, which the chief said has gotten “outdated a little bit for what our needs are.”

“Sometimes [the transcripts] can’t even be used in court,” he said, “so we’re going with a new system that Southold has right now, and they love it, and it works really well for court cases and everything.”

The chief also said the department is training on a new records management system that allows Riverhead police to interface with more than a dozen other departments, including the Suffolk County Police Department, to find outstanding warrants, arrest records and police reports from other jurisdictions on suspects charged in Riverhead.

From a tactical point of view, Chief Frost has revived the crime control unit, which is focused on misdemeanor charges with an eye toward future prosecutions — and is overseen by a sergeant with experience in the detective division.

“A lot of our stores on [Route] 58 have a lot of [misdemeanor level] larceny, as well as — here and there — burglaries of some residential and some cars,” he said in an interview after the forum. “They go back and try and put cases together on the people who are gone from the scene by the time we arrive.

“There are individuals doing the same crimes in different areas, which we see a lot with retail stores: the same individuals hitting stores in Rocky Point, in Ronkonkoma, in Southampton, in Riverhead,” he continued. “So we try and put it all together — descriptions of cars and everything. It helps us out and the other departments involved and just saves a lot of time.”

In 2019, New York legislators passed a series of “bail reform” measures that severely restrict the use of cash bail and/or jail for misdemeanor or lowlevel offenses.

During a Riverhead Chamber of Commerce forum on public safety in June, Suffolk County’s chief assistant district attorney, Allen Bode, described a similar strategy at the county level to deal with “serial misdeameanant[s].”

“Sadly, under bail reform, police can arrest someone [for a misdemeanor], but essentially they’re giving them … an appearance ticket,” Mr. Bode said at the time. “They can’t be held in jail. So what we try to do is prioritize those cases … assign all those cases to one [county prosecutor] … If we can’t hold them in jail, we get those cases ready, push them forward and we send them to jail or prison.”

Riverhead Supervisor Tim Hubbard, a 32-year veteran of the town’s police department, who hosted Saturday’s forum, said Riverhead officials are also working with the police department to upgrade patrol cars from allwheel drive Ford Explorers to fourwheel drive Chevrolet Tahoes.

“It always bothered me when I was working as a cop — and even to this day — that we’re surrounded by beaches and these are allwheel drive cars,” the supervisor said. “They’re not four-wheel drives and they can’t go on beaches. So if we have an incident on the beach, somebody would have to get to headquarters, get a four-wheel drive pickup, and go all the way back to the scene.”

Mr. Hubbard said the upgraded vehicles, the cost of which will be covered in the upcoming budget, are vital for patrol units.

“We can go in smaller vehicles maybe for the detectives, and maybe even for the lieutenants, but for the patrol force itself, Tahoes are needed,” the supervisor said. “We all know on these snowy days when you get a big storm, all-wheel drive isn’t that great. You get about four inches of snow and you’re grounded — you’re not going anywhere.”

Chief Frost, 54, started with the Riverhead Police Department in 1994, straight out of the police academy. He worked in the department’s community response unit, and spent 12 years as a patrol sergeant and six years as a detective sergeant. In 2021 he was promoted to lieutenant. Last year, he was promoted to sergeant, and was appointed police chief in August.

The chief grew up in Queens, but spent summers in Wading River, where his father built a home in the 1950s. He moved to Wading River full time in 1989. He and his wife have three adult children. The law enforcement veteran said at Saturday’s forum that working with the community is vital to the success of the department’s policing. “We can’t be everywhere, and the more the community helps us, trusts us — and calls us — the better the community is going to be in general,” he said.

The second forum was held Tuesday evening at Riverhead Town Hall, and the third is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 14, at Riley Avenue Elementary School, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The chief said that events like “Meet the Chief” are a key part of his strategy going forward.

“This is a great setting,” Chief Frost said Saturday. “I’m probably going to have them quarterly in different locations, because I think the community buy-in to the department — where they trust us — is paramount to the success of any law enforcement agency.”